Tag Archives: tessa thompson

There’s weirdness for the sake of being weird, and then there’s the absolutely trippy, ridiculous, absurdist, balls out fucking fever dream that is Sorry to Bother You. I can appreciate movies that are a little out there, but Bother leaves “out there” in the dust a few light years behind it. Ostensibly a comedy about a telemarketer angling for a better future, it’s really a darkly (like pitch black) subversive tale about the racial and class divides and inequality in our country, and the struggle in trying to bridge those gaps.

I read somewhere that before he adapted Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, writer-director Alex Garland (writer-director of Ex Machina, writer of 28 Days Later and Never Let Me Go, and the novel The Beach) opted not to re-read the original novel but instead did the script from memory to give it a dream-like quality. This is evident on screen as the entirety of the thoughtful, interesting, slow-moving but creepy and confounding Annihilation has an ethereal quality that flows between each scene.

Despite my self-admitted fanboyism of all things superhero in general and Marvel in specific, I can be either instantly engaged with the latest men in tights flick or overly critical. The truth is, I haven’t liked more Marvel movies than I’ve loved. The first two Thor movies were crap, aside from perfect casting there is nothing I enjoyed in three Iron Man movies, save for thirty seconds of Black Widow in number 2 (the worst of the three). I was disappointed in the first Captain America and Doctor Strange. The trailers for Thor: Ragnarok painted a different picture for the third installment of the Asgardian thunder god, a more lighthearted and on the road style flick. In short, Ragnarok is easily the funniest movie in the MCU, and second only to Deadpool in comedy in the overall superhero library.